In 2019 the explorer and businessman Victor Vescovo discovered the Factorian Deep , which is, so far, the deepest point in the Antarctic Ocean. The area is almost 7,437 meters below the sea surface, which would be like putting 17 Empire State buildings on top of each other. Vescovo’s find came while he was on his Five Depths Expedition to map the deepest points of the world’s five oceans. The explorer personally piloted a submersible called Limiting Factor to the bottom of the South Atlantic Ocean’s Sandwich Trench, an underwater canyon that spans some 600 miles of seafloor between South America and Antarctica.
The trench crosses the 60th parallel south, an invisible circle of latitude 60 degrees south of the equator that separates the Atlantic and Antarctic oceans. The Vescovo expedition mapped the entire length of the South Sandwich Trench for the first time, discovering the new deepest point in the Southern Ocean just south of the 60th parallel.
Now the new deepest point in the Southern Ocean, the Factorian Deep, is documented for the first time on a map of the seafloor . In a new study, published June 7 in the journal Scientific Data , an international team of researchers included the depths of the Factorian in a new extensive map of the Southern Ocean’s underwater mountains, canyons and plateaus.
The new map that includes the Factoryian Deep
The huge map is the fruit of a joint effort by the International Bathymetric Map of the Southern Ocean (IBCSO), which began mapping the Southern Ocean in 2013, and the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project, which aims to map the entire global seabed by 2030.
The new map takes into account more than 1,200 sonar data sets , mostly collected by scientific ships around the world and the robust icebreakers that pave the way for them, the researchers note in the publication. The seafloor chart covers more than 18.5 million square miles, some 48 million square kilometers, of seafloor, which is more than double the coverage of the first IBCSO map of the region, which was published in 2013. .
Although it seems that the coverage is gigantic, the truth is that there is still a lot of work to be done to complete the project . If the 48 million square kilometers of the map were divided into a grid of squares of approximately 500 square meters each, only 23% of those squares would have at least one modern depth measurement, according to the BBC. In this sense, the IBCSO encourages all ships that pass through the Southern Ocean to turn on their sonars and contribute data to the project.
Visualizing the peculiarities and contours of the Southern Ocean is important for a number of reasons, IBCSO officials explained to the BBC. In addition to being obviously useful in navigation, the maps help in biological research as they indicate where seamounts are located, which are often hotspots of underwater biodiversity. The depth of the ocean also influences the movement of currents and the vertical mixing of water, which are factors that are taken into account in climate models that show how the oceans move heat around the planet.
Referencia: Dorschel, B., Hehemann, L., Viquerat, S. et al. 2022. The International Bathymetric Chart of the Southern Ocean Version 2. Scientific Data. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01366-7
